1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to prognostic health of aircraft. More particularly, the present invention relates to automatically detecting and evaluating residual strength of aircraft, especially those that are manufactured using advanced composite materials, and adapting their flight based upon their health condition.
2. Related Art
Today's advanced airborne weapons systems push the limits of technology to achieve greater speed, payload, and efficiency than previous generation systems. As a result of the use of advanced composite materials, performance has increased significantly. The tradeoff for the improved performance from composites is that when the aircraft are on the ground and in between sorties, advanced systems and structures require extensive maintenance, including detailed inspections to ensure light weight-critical structures enabled by composites have not been damaged. To achieve aggressive cost and manpower savings on next generation platforms, composite structures must be designed to be capable of monitoring their own health and adapting their flight based upon their health condition. Similarly, the technology is equally applicable to commercial aircraft.
While an onboard health monitoring system that performs diagnostic inspections on airframes has been shown to be feasible through test and demonstration, there remains a need for a system that can adapt the performance of the aircraft to the diagnostic information obtained by the onboard health monitoring system.